Production Quality, Multilayer Open Virtual Switch

What is Open vSwitch?

Open vSwitch is a production quality, multilayer virtual switch licensed under the open source Apache 2.0 license. It is designed to enable massive network automation through programmatic extension, while still supporting standard management interfaces and protocols (e.g. NetFlow, sFlow, IPFIX, RSPAN, CLI, LACP, 802.1ag). In addition, it is designed to support distribution across multiple physical servers similar to VMware's vNetwork distributed vswitch or Cisco's Nexus 1000V. See full feature list here

To understand why virtualized environments require a new approach to switching, read the WHY-OVS document that is distributed with the source code.

Open vSwitch is used in multiple products and runs in many large production environments (some very, very large). Each stable release is run through a regression suite of hundreds of system-level tests and thousands of unit tests.

In addition to OVS, the Open vSwitch community maintains the OVN project. OVN complements the existing capabilities of OVS to add native support for virtual network abstractions, such as virtual L2 and L3 overlays and security groups.

News

Open vSwitch Fall Conference 2018 was held Dec. 5 and 6 in San
Jose. You can view the
slides and videos.